keep you in light
by androidilenya
Summary: Thingol sits by his daughter's side, and waits for her to return to him. Oneshot.


**Originally written for the 30 Days of Headcanon meme on tumblr.**

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_But the spirit of Lúthien fell down into darkness, and at last it fled, and her body lay like a flower that is suddenly cut off and lies for a while unwithered on the grass. Then a winter, as it were the hoar age of mortal Men, fell upon Thingol._

~From The Silmarillion, Chapter 19, 'Of Beren and Lúthien'

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"This is my fault," Thingol told his daughter distantly, smoothing back her dark hair, adjusting her already perfect blue dress. She lay as though asleep, eyes closed, limbs relaxed on the long grass — but he knew better.

They said her spirit had fled, that she had forsaken this land of darkness and gone to the lands of eternal light that lay in the West. But Thingol had been there, before shadow and blood stained it, and knew that the light of the Two Trees was gone, and there was nothing for Lúthien there — just as there was no longer anything for him here.

_Where are you, Lúthien?_

"Elu?"

He had not heard his wife's approach, but then again, Melian was ever light on her feet, seeming to barely touch the earth as she moved whisper-soft over stone and grass alike. Probably one of the side effects of being a Maia, and one of those things he had learned to take for granted all these years.

"You should come inside. There are others who can watch — others who can stay by her side."

He looked up, intending to reply, but a flash of white caught his eye and he absentmindedly plucked the pale blossom from the earth, tucked it behind Lúthien's ear, a flash of star-like brilliance against her hair. These were the same blossoms that had sprung up when she was born, to greet the princess of Doriath, fairest of the Children of Ilúvatar. He had known she was special (then again, every father thought his child was the one that would change the world, but there had been a ring of undeniable truth to the words when he spoke them to Melian, _she will be great,_ and she had nodded with the foresight of her kind in her eyes). All he had wanted was for her to be happy—

_Was she happy?_

When he looked up again, Melian was gone. He wondered distantly if she had grown impatient with him at last and flown back to Valinor. Maybe she could find their daughter there.

_Lúthien…_

He had wanted her to be happy, but he had wanted her to be safe, too. And in Doriath, that was possible — here, in the center of the war-torn Beleriand, was a sheltered garden for his flower to grow in.

For years, that had been enough. Lúthien had grown up here, had blossomed into maturity here — and if Thingol had a tendency to use flowery metaphors when thinking of her, it was only because he always had some vague sense that if he could only do the right thing (as when he gardened — the right amount of water, the right amount of light, the right leaves clipped off) then he could keep his daughter happy forever.

Daughters were not, apparently, flowers. It came as a surprise the first time she rebelled against him — over some small thing, he did not even remember what now — and Melian had had to remind him that Lúthien had reached her full maturity and was able to make her own decisions. He bit back his protests and watched as his child began to make her own way in the world, something like pain inside him.

Still, he had thought he could keep her in Doriath, safe. And she _had_ stayed in his forest — but danger walked right in and asked for her hand in marriage nonetheless.

The idea of a mortal — baseborn, doomed to death, ignorant — laying a hand on his daughter was enough to tip him over the edge into fury. He had laughed scornfully in Beren's face, ignoring the hurt in Lúthien's eyes and the despair when he set the mortal with an impossible task. It shook him (only slightly) when Beren laughed right back at him and told him he'd be back with a Silmaril, but he thought nothing of it. The Man would die, and his daughter would be with him still.

He did not foresee Lúthien's open rebellion, did not expect to be woken by a servant frantically gasping out the words — _she's gone, her bed's empty, I don't know where_ — and when he sprinted to her platform (it had been for her safety, and right, no matter the disapproval in Melian's eyes) he had been afraid, for the first time in a long time.

When the letter from the two brothers arrived, a proposal that was really a threat, he crumpled the parchment in his fist and stood, trying to keep the anger back (that anger that was always there, now, no matter what he did to rein it in) — and then he snarled, and tore the letter into two ragged halves, casting them to the floor and storming out.

_I just want her back, _he had told the sky above, and received no answer from the clouded vault.

Yet his prayer had been answered, in the end, and even as news of a new terror on the border reached his ears — the mortal's fault, again, was there nothing Thingol could do against him? — his daughter returned, hand-in-hand with Beren, a happiness on her face that almost made him regret his earlier words.

_For you, Lúthien, I will smile._

He let Beren take her hand before his throne.

Then again, back into danger, and this was far too close to his home, and too close to Lúthien. There was nothing he would not do to keep Carcharoth as far away as possible from her, and he could see the same desire in Beren's eyes, and almost thought this mortal could, perhaps, be the right one for her. Almost.

He saw the light die in her eyes when he returned with Beren's bloody body, fallen defending his wife's father from the Hound of Morgoth, dead fulfilling an oath he should never have had to swear.

"I'm sorry," he told her, and she looked up at him, eyes bright with tears, before leaning over Beren, smoothing back his hair and running her hands along his bloodied chest, fingers probing the wound as though she could seal it, give her lover back his life.

Thingol had spent enough time in his garden, tending his plants, to know when a flower was going to die. Plants had the same curse as the race of Men — mortality. Perhaps it had been that fleeting beauty that attracted him to them in the first place, prompted him to spend hours alone among twisting vines and blooming flowers. But his daughter — she was not mortal, she should not have had this distant, dark look in her eyes, and there should not have been the same feeling of death about her as there was about the shriveled petals of an autumn rose.

He felt the moment her spirit fled.

She was still as beautiful in this not-sleep as she had always been. He could still protect her — still sit by her side, comfort her (even if she could not hear him), and guard her from further harm.

_I'm still here, Lúthien._

He plucked another _niphredil_, dropped it on her dress, and waited.


End file.
